1919 Cairo: A City of Revolt, Relics & Ruthless Treasure Hunters with Sean McLachlan

[: 00:00:00

It is 1919 and Cairo. Egypt stands at a crossroads. The great war is over, but its scars remain. The streets pulse with revolution as Egyptian nationalists rise against British rule while in the shadows. Spies, treasure hunters and smugglers fight their own secret battles. Ancient relics disappear into the black market.

Rumors, swirl of lost tombs yet to be uncovered. And a city once ruled by Pharaohs is now a chessboard. For empires.

Hey, I'm Luke. I'm an author of archeological Adventure novels. I traveled the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the adventure. Story podcast today, Sean McLaughlin's guiding us through that mysterious world, an archeologist and an award-winning author.

er the Backstreet of Cairo in: 1919

[: 00:01:23

Hi, Luke. Thank you for having me.

[: 00:01:24

It's great to be able to talk to you. I've visited Cairo, and I know you spend several months a year there, but how is it different today when we walk around that city to what it would've been like in in 1919?

[: 00:01:36

Well, it's interesting because in some ways it's completely different. In other ways it's very much the same. Now, of course, in 1919 there were cars on the streets, but now there's flyovers and concrete everywhere and. Cairo traffic is is crazy. I don't think anyone has ever died of a car crash in Cairo.

'cause the cars never move fast enough for it to be fatal. Every car is dented and scraped up and scratched, but a lot of the old historical buildings remain. And if you go into the old part of town, which is commonly referred to as Islamic Cairo, although of course it's all Islamic. It's like you're stepping back in time.

You'll pass all of these old mattresses and these mosques dating back a thousand years. Sometimes these old fountains, brilliantly carved fountains, public fountains that rich Ottomans or ma looks made for the neighborhood. And the markets are still wonderfully full of old brass lanterns and the smell of, uh, spices and then of course a bunch of cheap Chinese imports.

So it's a little mix of everything.

[: 00:02:41

It's so evocative of what you've said because I'm imagining there what it's like and what my experience was and what you said about the cars is, is so true. You know, crossing the road is a real challenge.

[: 00:02:52

Yeah. Uh, basically what you have to do to cross the road, because I.

There are stoplights and everything, but, but those are only casually, uh, observed. You basically just have to walk out, making eye contact with each driver in turn, and don't start and stop. Don't jerk, don't panic. 'cause if you just go on a, on a proper steady vector, they'll calculate and they'll miss you.

[: 00:03:14

It's scary, I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. So Egypt is quite common in adventure stories. A lot of people write adventure stories about Egypt. Mostly though they sort of descend from, or focus on in some way ancient Egypt, you know, pharaohs and the like. But what makes 1919 or Cairo in that era stand out as a, as a good setting for an adventure story?

[: 00:03:36

I first went to Egypt in 1991 for the same reason everyone else did. 'cause I wanted to see the pyramids and I wanted to see Carac. I wanted to see all that and it was wonderful and I love that stuff. But for me, I find the more modern history of Egypt equally fascinating. And 1919 was a watershed year because during World War I, the British had already had a protectorate in Egypt, although technically the Ottoman Empire.

Was still owned Egypt as a, as a province, although in reality it, it wasn't. And when those two nations ended up on opposite sides of World War I, the mask fell. Britain declared, uh, Egypt an official protector, kicked out all the Turks. It had quite a lot of battles in the Sinai and everything, and eventually defeated the the Ottoman Turks.

During that time, they drafted a a million men into the Egyptian Labor Corps to help with the Sinai and Palestine campaigns, and sent a lot of them to Flanders. Um, these poor Egyptian fellen that had never been outside their village were suddenly in, in, in rainy Belgium getting shelved by the Germans.

ses about independence. Well,: 1918

y upset about this. And so in: 1919

So my series I. Starts in: 1919

[: 00:05:50

That's so interesting. I love that, that your, that your series is spanning those years through that period and actually, I suppose.

How do you manage to intertwine your story with those events without it actually being directly about those events? Because they're half mystery, they're half adventure in their own right, aren't they? Without, while the events are the backdrop.

[: 00:06:08

Yeah. Part of how I do it is that I have three different main characters.

One is a English World War I veteran whose. Suffers from PTSD, even though they didn't have those terms back then and has moved to Cairo. He hates Europe. He wants to get away from it. Opens up an antiquity shop. His assistant is a Sudanese scholar and is sort of iffy about independence at first, but that.

Changes as the books develop. And he has some problems in the sense that he's a scholar. He's, he has the superpower I always wanted, which is he speaks multiple languages and you can read hieroglyphics like you and I can read the newspaper, but he can't really break into the scholarly world in an English dominated colony.

There's also a level of racism of of Egyptians against Sudanese. So he has that double layer. So. He wants independence for the Sudan and Egypt, but at the same time, his job relies on the British being there, so it's tricky. And then the third character is a Egyptian Street urchin, a homeless kid who is not really interested in independence.

He just wants to eat, and he gets caught up in all these adventures too. So I use all these different perspectives to look at the same events, and I've always been fascinated with that as a writer and as a reader. How one event can be looked at from many different ways, and none of those perspectives is wrong.

They're just integral to that person.

[: 00:07:37

I get that completely. I can see that in the way that you've written it. And I love that because it's, it is also sort of showing the plight of characters who are underrepresented in, in stories like the ones we write, aren't they? These are people who, who aren't really featured in main character roles in, in stories like that.

[: 00:07:55

Yeah, and you see this to this day, I have Sudanese friends who live in Egypt and they still in 2025, experienced some racism and I've done some work, some charitable work with homeless kids in Cairo and in, so I've dealt with that as well, and there's quite a lot of them. Unfortunately. What I find interesting about those homeless kits is they have their own sort of esprit decor many, many times.

Some shabby little kid, you know, 10-year-old with no shoes will come up and I'll give him a coin or I'll give him like an orange or something and then I'll see him run off to his buddy and then divide the orange or divide the money and. It's, it's remarkable and it's very humbling when you see that.

[: 00:08:41

It is. I I can imagine that. I like that as a, yeah. I think we've lost something, but that's a different conversation for a, for a different day. Certainly. So your books now are, are within the sort of roaring twenties, you know, this is. The height of Egyptology from a European perspective, certainly, uh, king Tuts tomb, you know, the British Museum.

r periods and, and during the: 1919

[: 00:09:16

Well, archeology took a bit of a hiatus during the war, but came back strong afterwards and it was sort of a golden age for Egyptology.

ciphered the Rosetta Stone in: 1822

But by the time my book starts, they had a really good handle on the ancient Egyptian language that was opening up all the literature, all this papyrus was being discovered. There were excavations. Uh, the British had a lot of excavations, but so did the French, the Germans, the Spanish, even the Czechs, the Czech are, are remarkable.

They, they really punch above their weight when it comes to archeology in Egypt. They, they've been digging there for more than a century little country, but. But a lot of research and so a lot was being discovered. A lot of tombs were being opened. Howard Carter was searching for King TT while most of his contemporaries said, oh, you, you know, you're a really good draftsman.

You should just be drawing pictures of, of the temples that were digging up. You know, you shouldn't be wasting your time trying to find a, a tomb that is obviously not there. There was a huge amount of excavations and, and my Sudanese character basically grows up working in these excavations. And that's, that's interesting that there was a fight even then over whose past it was because you had these foreign archeologists who were running the digs and had the money to run the digs and the organization, but the regular diggers and all the, uh, the foreman, the people who were actually making the discoveries, they were all Egyptian or Sudanese.

Some of these for, were just as knowledgeable as the dig directors and they, they were becoming researchers themselves, but they were having a hard time getting into the universities. It was just beginning to change. When my book takes place, you were beginning to get recognized Egyptian scholars, but it was still an uphill battle.

[: 00:11:18

It is interesting to see that. Yeah, because it's the, it's the Howard Carters that are, that are the ones that are quite often remembered, aren't they? Less so the diggers and the local knowledge that's that's allowed that to happen.

[: 00:11:31

Yeah, there's, I don't know if you've ever been to the Flinders Petri Museum of Egyptology at University College London, but they did a really good thing.

They have in the display cases, each display case has a photo of one of the dig foreman, you know, some like old black and white photo. A lot of these from like the twenties or the thirties or something next to objects they discovered. So giving those people their names and faces back and saying, oh, well.

Yeah, Flinder's Petrie did this excavation, but you know, Hamel Yusuf was the one who found this paw.

[: 00:12:03

I'm gonna look that up and and then go there next time I'm in London. 'cause that sounds great.

[: 00:12:07

Oh, it's a brilliant museum. Yeah, it's wonderful.

[: 00:12:09

So where there's archeology, there tends to be a dark side of that, which I certainly play on in my books and I know you do as well.

How widespread was the sort of smuggling of these artifacts or the replication or the illegal distribution of these artifacts in Egypt and around that time and. Do you know who the major players were and sort of how did you work that into your story?

[: 00:12:32

Well, there was a, a fair amount of smuggling. I don't have any names for you as far as what people were actually doing that, but there were families that specialized in falsifying artifacts, creating artifacts, and as I have, I have that Egyptian Turkish couple who are faking artifacts because Sir Augustus my antiquities dealer.

Only sells real artifacts to, uh, people who actually show a knowledge of Egyptology. And then he just sells the fakes to the tourists. So there was a lot of that going on because there was a demand, you know, people would pay for it. And the Egyptians got good enough to be able to, to falsify these, these objects fairly easily.

Now papyrus is a little difficult 'cause it's pretty obvious if, if something's modern on papyrus. A shop tea or a, or a sculpture or something like that, or a, a piece of a freeze that, that, that's fairly easy to make. 'cause the Egyptians are, are excellent craftsmen. You make it, beat it up, make it look old, and uh, then sell it on the market. That's still happening today.

[: 00:13:34

I can imagine entrepreneurial spirit, you know, at work right there.

[: 00:13:38

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've actually been offered, uh, artifacts on a number of occasions and I looked at them and sometimes I could tell they were fake and sometimes I couldn't. And so like, this might be fake or it's stolen either way. I don't want it.

[: 00:13:50

So it has to have some kind of provenance or some kind of Yes. You know, certificate to say this is where it came from and all.

[: 00:13:56

Yeah. It's also hugely illegal to, to buy that stuff and I, I would be kicked outta the country.

[: 00:14:01

I see. Yeah, of course. Because those things need to be looked after, don't Yeah, of course.

So talking about yours, archeological background, because it's great to talk to someone who is an actual archeologist. My books have a lot of in inverted commas, archeology in them. They look for old things and go to archeological places, but we don't worry about the technical bits too much. How did your real world experience shape the way you wrote about this?

And did you have to be careful? Not to get too technical.

[: 00:14:31

Getting too technical is always a, a, a temptation. And also one tricky thing was, was casting my mind back to the archeological techniques of the 19 teens, 1920s, which were very different from what they are now. So I actually looked at archeology training manuals from a hundred years ago to see what they learned and how they did things because when I was coming up in the nineties.

We were already getting the beginnings of ground penetrating radar and, and Carbon 14 dating and all this other stuff that didn't exist back then. But I started in, uh, I worked in Israel, I worked in Cyprus and Bul area. I worked all over the United States a lot in Illinois and uh, Arizona. So, yeah. Um, I never dug into Egypt though, which is too bad.

But I've, I've worked in a lot of different places and. It never stops being fascinating because with every scrape of the trial, you're bringing up more of the past. More of the past, and to see that that, you know, like a. When I was digging in Bulgaria, we were doing a Bronze Age village. And just to see that slowly come out, all the foundations of the stone buildings and everything, and that was a, an interesting, uh, dig because there were so many layers to it.

We were digging this obviously artificial mound on top of a steep hill at the curve of the Streamer River. And the streamer River runs from Bulgaria down into Greece and. We had heard that it was a Roman two. That was the local thing, was it was that it was Roman two, so we thought we were gonna dig a Roman two.

ating from the Balkan Wars in: 1911

So we got through that. Then we found the Roman burials, but there weren't very many of them, but there was still a bunch of mound left. So we're like, hmm, now there are more, more Roman burials underneath this. And we started digging down and we found a very well preserved Bronze age village, uh, with stone foundations, a lot of pottery, a lot of other artifacts.

And it was brilliant. You know, it to have all those layers of all that history from something that's almost within living memory to a village whose name and inhabitants, no one can remember.

[: 00:16:58

It must be beautiful to reconstruct that because as opposed to a normal person, a layman, what you've got is a bit of rock and a bit of this and a bit of that and whatever.

But to you, because of your experience, you can put a narrative into that and you can put it together and make it important and make it count for something, I suppose.

[: 00:17:17

Yeah, and it was a, it was a lot of fun and. You have these sort of aha moments. I, I, for most of all the, the Sudanese scholar, I kind of used some of my early archeological experience with him.

Not the specific details. 'cause I wasn't, he started out digging in the Sudan. I've never dug in the Sudan, but just those aha moments. He starts out as just a, a regular digger at age 16. He does it because it makes him money. He is just a village kid. He doesn't know anything about the past. And he discovers a statue of King Tatarka, and this was from the, uh, the 25th Nubian sty that came up and conquered Egypt and took over.

And he's like, what's, oh, what's this? You know? And, and it's like, it's a statue, it's a person. And, and he's like, oh, so is this Egyptian? And the take director's? Like, no, he's, he was Sudanese. And they invaded and took over Egypt and, and the 16-year-old kid is like, but Egypt always beats us in wars. He's like, no, no, no, no, not that time.

And he's like, oh, wow. And that brings up his interest. And then his various patrons realize that he's got a sharp mind and is learning can learn languages quickly. And so it becomes an assistant works his way up, moves to to Egypt to do more digs. That's when my three main characters meet is he's a, a, a foreman on an excavation in, in the Giza Plateau.

[: 00:18:37

Mm-hmm. Mm. And I did enjoy meeting him when I read, uh, the Masked Man of Cairo. The first one is called the Purloin Pyramid, isn't it?

[: 00:18:45

Yes. The case of the Purloin pyramid. Mm.

[: 00:18:47

So talking about adventure stories then. What stories, whether they were books or movies or legends or the sort of campfire stories that we tell each other as children.

What sort of stories was it that sparked your imagination and your want to both go into archeology as a career and then come and write about it in the fiction world afterwards? I.

[: 00:19:09

Well, I inhaled archeology as a kid. Uh, I love that stuff. I'm Canadian and I grew up in Toronto and I remember going as a kid to the Royal Ontario Museum and they had this mummy there that was half unwrapped, like unwrapped down to the chest and it's all like desiccated.

face with this nobleman from: 3000

So that was an early spark. I really got into mythology. I loved the the Nors sagas and the prose and poetic eds. I liked all the great Roman stuff. The Egyptian stuff too, of course. But I also read in the eighties when I was in high school, there was that big boom in fantasy literature. So I was reading a lot of that as well.

I read Ursula Lewin's Earth Sea Trilogy several times. Uh, for some reason that became my final exam series. I would read the trilogy, uh, every time I had final exams from middle school all through high school. So I, I, I think I read the trilogy seven times.

[: 00:20:24

Fascinating stuff. I love to, I love to hear that. And it's nice to hear the stories that inspired you as well as that gruesome mummy in the, in the museum.

[: 00:20:32

I hope it's still there.

[: 00:20:34

I hope so. It survived several thousand years, so perhaps, yeah.

[: 00:20:37

I hope they still have at a kid level too.

[: 00:20:39

That was a nice touch. Uh, I wonder if they realized that they'd inspired your life, didn't it?

[: 00:20:44

Well, I, they definitely put it at that level on purpose. That, that was definitely planned.

[: 00:20:50

Sean, that was absolutely fantastic. Tell us where we can find you and your books online.

[: 00:20:54

The name's Sean McLaughlin, S-E-A-N-M-C-L-A-C-H-L-A-N. So you can go to sean mccallan.net or hit me up on Amazon. The Mask Man of Cairo series is the series we're talking about there, but I have other mystery series.

I have one set in Tanger. I have one set in Weimar Berlin, uh, and a bunch of other books. So you go to seanmclaughlin.net, or I'm on Instagram and Facebook at as writer Sean, you know, just writer and SEAN. And, uh, my Facebook group is pretty active and I, I post photos from my travels all the time.

[: 00:21:26

Sean, thank you so much.

[: 00:21:28

Well, thank you for having me.

[: 00:21:33

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